Civic Intelligence in the Age of AI: Alignment, Inquiry, and the Conditions for Democratic Flourishing

Abstract This paper proposes that the challenges posed by artificial intelligence in education and civic life are best understood not as crises of capability, integrity, or control, but as symptoms of misaligned conditions of inquiry. It introduces the concept of civic intelligence: the distributed capacity of a population to understand, navigate, and ethically engage with shared systems of power. The paper identifies five architectural conditions necessary for coherent inquiry: purposeful prompts, clear constraints, stable context, explicit alignment objectives, and reduced cognitive noise. When these conditions are present, intelligence flourishes; when absent, anxiety, disengagement, and defensive behaviour predictably follow. Within this framework, AI appears neither as a threat to human judgment nor as a substitute for it, but as an amplifying force that reveals the alignment state of existing systems. The paper examines implications for higher education and democratic participation, arguing that the restoration of inquiry conditions is prerequisite to sustainable civic capacity in an age of accelerating technological mediation. Keywords: civic intelligence; AI alignment; higher education; democratic participation; inquiry conditions; cognitive architecture